![]() ![]() While the look of the game is fantastic, it’s in nearly other area where its performance is uneven, mostly in gameplay. ![]() It’s not eye candy in the traditional sense, but it looks so distinct that it may as well be (though trypophobes might want to be warned, as there are several instances that might upset you). Mo’s world – and the technology she uses – feels alien in a way that few media manages to accomplish these days, assisted by some stellar animation work and a persistently lonesome atmosphere. While the game’s artstyle is apparently simple, with thin lines and soft colors, the world explored is anything but – a mishmash of natural rocky terrain and bizarre bio-mechanical land features, like a mishmash of Akira and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. Much of Minute of Islands’s peculiar vibes can be attributed to its visuals, far and away its most immediately outstanding attribute. This describes the game in a fairly objective manner, but does little to explain the experience of playing it, which is drawn out in narration and collecting Mo’s memories scattered throughout to form a complicated, entangled portrait of a young woman and the people in and out of her life. You do this by light puzzle-platforming and exploration, finding sets of purifiers to cleanse the air of spores before retreating below to awaken the giants one by one. You play Mo, a young tinkerer who must explore the underground of nearby islands in order to awaken four giants and repair her world on the brink of collapse. Minute of Islands is a game that is both simple and complicated to explain. In the end, however, the game surprised me with an emotive, disruptive last quarter, which ended up providing a disquietingly beautiful conclusion – even if the whole product can be a bit rickety. While I would never dare to suggest that these games are all the same, especially considering the number that have affected me in small or great parts, I can understand how an outsider might make a mockery of it.Įven with my distaste for that aphorism, I had it a lot on my mind during much of my playthrough of Minute of Islands, an indie puzzle-platformer by German-based Studio Fizbin, as it seemed to go through the motions that a lot of its fellow indie games had inspired. There’s a joke I hear around the gaming community sometimes that’s some variation of “every game these days is either about a man with a gun or a woman with depression.” While obviously reductive for comedic purposes, at times it feels like there’s a real strain of truth to that observation, as more and more AAA games become open-world shoot fests that you can all play with your Buddies™ for Hundreds of Hours™ while indie games in turn offer personal, abstract, non-violent games that often center around mental illness or other struggles that are difficult to headshot away in real life. ![]()
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